1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server system including a print service, a method for a printing system, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a printing system using a print server has been known. The print server controls printing processing by managing a printer provided on a network, issuing a print job based on a print instruction from a user, and transmitting the print job to the printer. The user accesses to the print server via a client personal computer (PC) to instruct the print server to execute the printing processing through a printer managed thereby. As described above, the print server provides the client PC with a printing function. Such a configuration in which the server operates a part of a function on behalf of the client PC is referred to as a provision of service from the server.
In recent years, increasing attention has been given to a cloud computing. The cloud computing is also a configuration in which the server provides the client PC with services. The cloud computing is characterized in that distributed processing for data conversion or data processing is performed by employing various computing resources to concurrently process the requests from various clients. There appeared a vendor who provides various kinds of Web services through a network by implementing the services on the cloud computing environment. For example, in addition to establishing a number of large-scale data centers, Google (registered trademark) provides a Web service known as Google Cloud Print (registered trademark) which allows printers to cooperate with the cloud.
Google Cloud Print (registered trademark) introduces an interface which allows a printer and/or a device provided with a proxy to perform data communication with a cloud computing environment (hereinafter, referred to as “server” or “server system”) provided by Google (registered trademark). If this interface is implemented into a printer, for example, a user can cause the printer to print data on a network specified via the client PC even if the printer is connected to the server via the internet.
In order to use the Web service to allow the device to cooperate with the server that provides the cloud service, the user needs to register the device on the server. The server generates a data group (i.e., device object) that is necessary to cooperate with the registered device, and acts as an intermediary between the user and the device via the device object when the server cooperates with the device. With respect to the device object, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-160579 discusses a technique for generating a printer object used to allow the printer to cooperate with the server that provides a print service upon receipt of a registration instruction of the printer.
However, the server discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-160579 is different from the server of the cloud service in the management method of the device object. In the server discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-160579, the data within the printer object is deleted entirely upon receipt of a deletion instruction of the printer provided from the user. On the other hand, in the cloud service, in order to enrich the service thereof, instead of deleting the device object that includes the device registration information and the usage history of the service, other method tends to be used to control the cloud service not to cooperate with the device. For example, in Google Cloud Print (registered trademark), in order to cope with reconnection of the printer or to use a usage record of the printer, the printer object is not deleted. Alternatively, display of a printer selection screen is controlled to allow the registered printer to be unusable to cope with a delete instruction from the user. Since the registered printer will not be displayed on the printer selection screen, the printer object will not be used by the user even if the printer object is not deleted.
Further, the following technique is also known as a technique of the cloud service. In the cloud service, in order to efficiently operate the computing resources while reducing a load of the user, a configuration for sharing the printer object is recommended. For example, Google Cloud Print (registered trademark) also corresponds to the above configuration. First, when a manager registers a printer on the server, a printer object corresponding to the registered printer is generated. Then, in order to allow users other than the manager to use the printer object corresponding to the registered printer, the manager performs a sharing operation of the printer. Thereafter, the user allowed to share the printer becomes a sharing user, so that the shared user can use the printer object corresponding to the printer registered by a registrant. The printer corresponding to the shared printer object is referred to as a shared printer, and the sharing user can use the printer object of the registered printer by selecting the shared printer from the printer selection screen.